Amazon Weekly Digest – 12/7/2018

What’s up Badger Nation? This is your host, The Badger, providing you with the top Amazon news this week.

Your Amazon Weekly Digest

This week, the numbers on Black Friday and Cyber Monday are in. The digital ad platform, Kenshoo, reported ad spend on Amazon was up 3.5x the week of Thanksgiving, Amazon said marketplace sellers increased their sales 20% year over year on Black Friday, and Adobe concluded U.S. online shoppers spent a record $7.869 billion on Cyber Monday this year.

The Black Friday and Cyber Monday numbers will blow you away. With the increase in revenue during these gigantic holidays, come more significant opportunities for Amazon sellers. Check out these articles along with some other tech and advertising news.

Marketing Land reports Kenshoo (a digital advertising platform) clients invested 2.2x more in native Amazon ads on Cyber Monday than Prime Day earlier this year. The overall Amazon ad spend during the 5 days between Thanksgiving Day and Cyber Monday up 3.5x the average than the prior week.

Amazon reported 2018’s Cyber Monday was, in fact, the biggest sales day EVER in Amazon history. In a press release, Amazon said:

Sales by small and medium-sized businesses worldwide grew more than 20% on Black Friday year-over-year.

Throughout the Turkey 5 (the week of Thanksgiving), Amazon customers ordered more than 180 million items.

Christmas lights were a bestseller on Prime Now.

The best-selling products at Amazon 4-star and Amazon Books over the Turkey 5 weekend included the all-new Echo Dot, “Becoming” by Michelle Obama, the Amazon Smart Plug, and the L.O.L. Surprise Series toys.

The best-selling products at Amazon Pop-Up device kiosks over the Turkey 5 weekend included the all-new Echo Dot and the Amazon Smart Plug.

Customers ordered more than four million toys and electronics on the mobile app on Black Friday.

Once again, reiterating the importance of Cyber Monday for Amazon sellers, sales went up 16.8% from last year. What is particularly interesting, is revenue generated from smartphones attributed to 21.2%, or $1.40 billion, of online sales on Cyber Monday. This is also a record for Amazon. This speaks to the ever-growing importance of mobile shopping. “Millennials were likely another reason for the dramatic growth in mobile, with 75% expecting to shop via their smartphone,” said, Mickey Mericle, Adobe vice president of marketing and customer insights.

Amazon just released new targeting features and we’re stoked. The targeting features allow you to better advertise to your customers by choosing specific products, brands, categories, or other product features to target your ads. Amazon has been continuing to improve targeting for Amazon sellers. With Google ads getting stronger and stronger, we imagine Amazon will make even more moves to match Google ads.

By the way, we just released a podcast discussing Amazon’s new advertising features. This includes category targeting, product targeting, and negative brand & product targeting. You can check it out here.

Amazon has announced Apple Music will be available on Echo devices starting the week of December 17. Amazon Echo users can now sync their favorite iTunes playlists on their Echo devices. Shall I say, “Alexa, shuffle Apple Music?”

Firefly, a platform for rideshare drivers to earn money through digital advertising received $21.5 million in seed funding and is launching this week. CEO Kaan Gunay said if the driver drives for a certain number of hours, the company their advertising for will pay them a flat fee to carry its advertising. Gunay also said the company is looking at ways to “maximize the revenue that we share with the drivers and give the maximum benefit to the drivers.”